Most AI and tech startups come to influencer marketing the same way. Someone on the team tries a few creators, one video does well, the next five don't, and suddenly the question is whether to hire help. Then the search starts, and every agency's site says roughly the same thing: big roster, great results, trusted by brands you know.
This guide is about telling them apart. It's written from our side of the table, so take that into account, but the questions work just as well on us as on anyone else.
Do you actually need an agency?
Not always. Most brands still run creator programs themselves. In Influencer Marketing Hub's 2026 benchmark survey of more than 600 brands and agencies, 66.33% said they run influencer programs entirely in-house, while 10.71% use a hybrid model and another 10.71% rely mainly on an agency (Influencer Marketing Hub).
An agency tends to make sense when one of these is true:
- You need more creators than your team can find, vet, contract and pay each month.
- Your product is new enough that nobody knows how to show it yet, and you need many angles tested quickly.
- You're entering an audience you don't know well, like students, musicians or senior engineers.
- You've tried a few creators yourself and can't tell why some posts worked and others didn't.
If you only plan to work with three or four creators a quarter, doing it in-house is often fine.
What should an agency do for you?
The same benchmark shows which parts brands hand off most. Creator discovery and vetting was the most outsourced function (19.44%), followed by content production (15.28%). Talent management, paid amplification and fraud detection were next at 12.5% each. Reporting and analytics was the least outsourced, at 6.94% (Influencer Marketing Hub).
That split is a good default. Hand off the work that takes time and relationships: finding the right people, checking them, briefing them, contracting and paying them, and keeping the posts coming. Keep the measurement close. You should own the promo codes, tracking links and sign-up data, and the agency should report against your numbers, not only theirs.
What makes AI and tech products different?
A food brand can send product and let the creator eat it on camera. An AI product usually needs a reason to exist in the viewer's life. "AI-powered" doesn't tell anyone anything. Someone showing what happened when they used the tool on their own problem does.
That changes what you need from an agency:
- Audience matching over follower counts. For our CodeRabbit work, the creators were senior and lead engineers, because that's who reviews code. For ByteDance's Gauth, they were students on campus. For ElevenLabs, they were Bookstagram and reading-community creators. The right creator for an AI product is whoever your buyer already listens to.
- A use case, not a script. The brief should explain the one thing the product does well for that audience, then let the creator show it their way.
- Volume and testing. It's hard to predict which angle will land for a new category. An agency should be able to run enough creators at once to learn quickly.
We go deeper on this in how AI and tech startups should run influencer campaigns.
What questions should you ask before signing?
Can you show me work in a category like mine?
Ask for specific campaigns, what the brief was and what came out of it. Look for work with products that also needed explaining. A good agency will tell you which parts of a campaign didn't work, too.
On our site, for example, we list the campaigns we can talk about with the numbers we're able to share: Suno (AI music) with 1000+ influencers and 100M+ views, CodeRabbit (AI code review) with 100+ influencers and 50M+ reach, Gauth with 80+ influencers, 10M+ views and 50+ universities, and ElevenLabs with 200+ influencers and 70M+ views. Whoever you talk to, ask for that level of detail and ask what sits behind it.
How do you find and vet creators?
This is where fraud comes in. In the 2026 benchmark, fake or bot followers were the most common fraud or quality problem brands reported, at 56.5% of responses, ahead of templated comments (10.6%) and purchased engagement (10.2%). Only 10.9% said they'd seen none of these (Influencer Marketing Hub).
Ask how the agency checks audiences before booking. Good answers mention looking at view counts across recent posts rather than one viral hit, comment quality, audience location and whether the people commenting look like your buyers.
How will you brief creators on our product?
Ask to see a sample brief. It should name the audience, the problem, the one or two things to show, the claims the creator can and can't make, and the disclosure rules. If the brief reads like an ad script, the videos will look like ads.
How many creators will you test, and what happens after?
One big creator is a bet. Ten to thirty smaller ones is a test. Ask how the first wave is set up, how long before they decide what's working, and how budget shifts toward the creators and concepts that perform.
What will you measure?
Views are the easiest number to report and the least useful on their own. In the benchmark, promo codes (45.9%) and affiliate links (26.0%) were the most common ways brands tracked results (Influencer Marketing Hub). For apps and AI tools, add sign-ups, installs and activation if you can track them. Agree on these before the first post goes live.
Who owns the content and the data?
Ask about usage rights up front: whether you can reuse creator videos in ads, on your site or in email, and for how long. Those rights often cost extra, so get them in writing. Make sure tracking links and codes are set up in your accounts.
How do you handle disclosure?
The FTC expects creators to disclose any material connection to a brand, including payment and free product, clearly and in the post itself rather than in a bio (FTC). An agency should build that into every brief and check it before posts go live.
What are the red flags?
- Guaranteed views or sales. Nobody controls the feed. Estimates are fine; guarantees aren't.
- Rosters sold by size. "We have 50,000 creators" tells you nothing about whether any of them reach your buyers.
- No access to raw results. If you can't see post-level numbers and links, you can't tell what worked.
- Everything scripted. Heavily scripted posts tend to look like ads, and viewers scroll past ads.
- No questions about your product. A good agency asks about your buyer, your activation moment and your competitors before it pitches creators.
How should you think about cost?
Creator costs are rising. Rising creator costs were the top challenge in the 2026 benchmark, picked by 35.4% of respondents, and 87.49% expected their influencer budgets to go up (Influencer Marketing Hub). Agency pricing varies too: some charge a management fee on top of creator fees, some bundle everything into a campaign price, some work on retainer.
Whatever the model, ask for the creator fees, usage rights, paid amplification and management cost as separate lines. That makes it easy to compare proposals and to see where money moves during a campaign. Our guide to budgeting a creator campaign walks through each line.
How does Dime work with AI and tech brands?
We're a creator marketing agency for AI and consumer tech brands, and our process has four steps: we match creators to the audience you need, build concepts around what your product actually does, launch and test many creators at once, then scale what works. Across campaigns we've activated 3,000+ creators and posted 10k+ pieces of content.
We also run a GEO program, because creator content is one of the ways brands get named by ChatGPT and other assistants. If you're comparing agencies, book a 30-minute call or send us a note, and bring the questions above.